Doobie Brothers

With all due respect to the work accomplished by the band in more recent years, most music fans generally perceive the glory days of The Doobie Brothers to be during the Warner Brothers era of their career. Why? Well, obviously, it’s because that’s when they appeared on an episode of What’s Happening!! and famously provided Rog – played by Ernest Thomas – with the excuse to call the Brothers’ hotel room and ask one of the greatest questions in both TV and rock ‘n’ roll history.

34 years ago today, The Doobie Brothers released One Step Closer, their ninth studio album and – as it turned out – the last studio album they’d release before disbanding for more than half a decade.

All things being equal, it’s possible that it was time for the Doobies to call it quits for a while, anyway: by the beginning of 1981, there wasn’t a single founding member of the band left in their lineup, and those who remained were well aware that it was only a matter of time before Michael McDonald kicked off a solo career. (Given that McDonald’s unmistakable voice could already be heard in so many other people’s songs, from Christopher Cross’s “Ride Like the Wind” to Nicolette Larson’s “Let Me Go, Love” to Kenny Loggins’ “This Is It,” it often seemed as if he’d already done so.)

It’s not that One Step Closer didn’t sell well (it hit #3 on the Billboard Top 200 and went platinum) nor that it didn’t feature any hit singles (“Real Love” went to #5, the title track made it into the top-40, and even “Keep This Train A-Rollin’” was a minor hit), but it’s clear that there’d been a major shift in the creative control of the band, and…well, fine, we’ll just go ahead and say it: there’s something not quite right when the rock ‘n’ roll band responsible for “Listen to the Music,” “Long Train Runnin’,” and “Black Water” kicks off an album with a song co-written by Paul Anka.

41 years ago today, the Doobie Brothers released the second single from their 1973 album, The Captain and Me, introducing generations of radio listeners to a town in Texas while simultaneously misinforming them about where samurai come from.

It’s relatively common knowledge that the band took their name from a friend’s suggestion – “You guys smoke so much pot, you should call yourselves the Doobie Brothers” – but there’s an unsubstantiated claim on Wikipedia that they got the titles of their demos from whatever cigarettes songwriter Tom Johnston was smoking at the time. We’re a bit doubtful of this assertion, as the only place we can find it is in discussions about “China Grove,” which was reportedly originally entitled “Parliament,” but, hey, maybe somewhere in the Warner Brothers archives there’s a demo for “Listen to the Music” that’ll never be found because the tape box is still labeled “Viceroy.” (We’ll get an intern on that right away.)

The ‘70s and ‘80s were decades that were chock full of big concerts being held for the best of reasons. Sometimes it was to draw attention to human rights issues (the Secret Policeman’s Ball, the Conspiracy of Hope tour), sometimes it was provide humanitarian aid (the Concert for Bangladesh, Live Aid), and sometimes – but particularly in the late ‘70s and early ‘80s – it was to take a stand and protest nuclear weapons.

In 1979, Madison Square Garden was booked from September 19th through the 23rd for the legendary “No Nukes” concerts in New York, which resulted in a triple-album document of the event that featured performances from – hang on, let us take a breath – the Doobie Brothers, Bonnie Raitt, John Hall, James Taylor, Carly Simon, Jackson Browne, Nicolette Larson, Ry Cooder, Sweet Honey in the Rock, Gil Scott-Heron, Jesse Colin Young, Raydio, Chaka Khan, Poco, Tom Petty and the Heartbreakers, Bruce Springsteen and the E Street Band, and Crosby, Stills and Nash. Whew! And that’s not even all of the artists who participated: others who were part of the event but didn’t find their way onto the distillation of the five shows include Peter Allen, Stephen Bishop, Paul Simon, and Peter Tosh.

This week in 1978, Minute by Minute, the eighth studio album from the Doobie Brothers, rose to the pinnacle of the Billboard Top 200. To date, it remains the band’s only #1 album, but the achievement was hardly a surprise to anyone who’d caught the band’s seminal appearance on a very special two-part What’s Happening!! episode – entitled “Doobie or Not Doobie” – only a few months earlier. After all, surely we can all agree that any band capable of holding their own against the formidable trio of Rerun, Roger, and Dwayne was destined to top the charts sooner than later.

Every Tuesday and Thursday, former Warner Bros. Records executive and industry insider Stan Cornyn ruminates on the past, present, and future of the music business.

1971-1980

After ten years – from the forming of the Doobie Brothers to the splitting up of that group – its members changed and changed, but its sound grew and grew.

But of the six Doobie Brothers’ members on year of birth (1972), ten years later, not a one remained in the group. It was all different guys.

Tracking all those changes has been done by others, and is not what this post is about. This one’s about tracking how the Doobies’ sound remained steady, passionate, attracting the masses, and not about some soloist’s voice.

For Warner Bros. Records, the Doobie Brothers made hit after hit, no matter who was at the mike. It started with these four.